They're looking for drives that haven't been wiped clean and contain valuable data.
By Gregg Keizer
TechWeb News
Posted on 01/31/2006 3:10:34 PM PST by Lokibob
Buyers on eBay troll the online auction site for used drives in the hope that the platters haven't been wiped clean and contain valuable data, including credit card numbers, a researcher said Monday.
Simson Garfinkel, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society, has been buying used hard drives on eBay since 2001, then analyzing the data he finds on some of the devices.
Of the 236 drives Garfinkel bought, 7 contained more than 300 recoverable credit card numbers; one from had more than 11,000 unique account numbers that he could retrieve.
That's because only 19 percent of drives he acquired had been wiped clean. The majority of previous owners had either not touched the drives or had only run the DOS commands FDISK and FORMAT, which actually leave data on the drive so users with simple diagnostic tools can read the information.
Some eBay buyers are sniffing for such drives. "I think that many drives sell for more than their market value," on eBay, Garfinkel said in an e-mail interview with TechWeb. The only explanation: they're playing the possibilities, and expect there's data on some of the drives they buy.
Garfinkel even tracked down the original owners of the 7 credit card-packed drives, using basic detective work such as analyzing the most common e-mail addresses on the platter and/or reviewing intact Word documents for clues.
The drive with 11,609 unique credit card numbers came from a medical center, which had also disposed of another drive with 81 additional numbers that Garfinkel purchased. Other drives came from an ATM (with 827 unique numbers), a supermarket (1,356 numbers), and an auto dealerships (498 numbers).
By Garfinkel's calculations, about 1,000 used drives are sold daily on eBay. Using his findings -- 3 percent of the drives he purchased contained more than 300 recoverable credit card numbers -- about 30 of those devices have confidential financial information.
It also had images in the browser cache that showed he liked to go to "spanking" sites. I was tempted to sell him back the hard drive, but I did a low level format on it instead.
How much for a big laptop drive? The biggest ones I have are 20 giggers.
When this old POS computer of mine bites the dust thats what I intend to do, Take a hammer to the hard drive.
ping
Go onto the ebay forums and copy and paste what you wrote here. they are good at giving advice. you can retract or change/edit your feedback you provided them. DO NOT pay them anything; the person is a scammer and is probably going to resell it on ebay under a different ID
"And (aside from criminals) why would anybody buy one?"
They want to score an unused 1997-99 FR User ID/password so everyone will stop calling them a "newbie" or "troll". :)
Reminds me of the time about 15 years ago when I got into work my boss had left an assignment for me. He wanted me to take the figures he had worked on (for a few hours) and use them on the proposal we were working on. There was his work, on one of those old 5-1/4" floppies, stuck to my overhead file with a big old kitchen magnet.
He thought I was a hero because I found it on his hard drive. Nice guy but dumb.
The male Bride of Frankenstein.
Zero writing utility.
It would have to be a REALLY strong magnet. Hard drive heads generate extremely powerful magnetic fields over a very small area very close to the surface of the disk. On such drives, a magnetic field can be strong enough to spin the platter without being strong enough to damage any data on it (indeed, some drives utilize this fact to avoid the need for a separate motor).
Hmmm... one could fish for a hungry buyer with a cheap drive and the right ad.
Where exactly do I go to post the information? I've already contacted Ebay 2-3 times and they are doing nothing. I need some help on this one.
http://livechat.ebay.com/Chat/servlet/AppMain?grp=Activation&__lFILE=index.jsp&PlacementID=000_ActivationInactiveHP
and
http://pages.ebay.com/community/answercenter/index.html
in the second one you can post the same thing in any number of forums that apply.
he's the one that sings el computero pasa
I'd rather be a hard dive than a floppy
yes i would
if i only could
i surely would
If he leaves you a neg, add to the feedback you have already left. You can make additional comments. I would write something about looking for a refund on a good product as blackmail.
Only do it if he negs you. If he does, you add that to his feedback. I can just about guarantee he will want to do a mutual removal.
You got lucky!
| Buyer XXXXXXX Dec-25-05 11:43 | XXXXXXXXX |
| Reply by me 11/7 echeck rec'd, 11/11 check clears, 11/11 item shipped, no customer contact | Dec-26-05 17:34 | ||||||
Reminds me of a guy in our town who got busted because he took his computer in to get it fixed.
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